A Lily's Parable
by DezoPenguin
Summary: One night, a man and a boy meet a strange woman by the river. She seems eerily similar to a figure from demon rumors, but the lessons to be taken from stories aren't always what they seem.


The moonlight was a cold silver, bathing the clearing around the river in its eerie light. A poet might have been moved to capture the beauty of the glow as it was snared by the water, fractured as the river's flow rippled around the rocks, but Masaru wasn't a poetic man. He'd worked hard throughout the day and into the evening. That bastard Toyama didn't care that he lost a couple of workmen every month to fiends; he wanted his castle built and he was going to squeeze every hour of labor he could out of the men. He knew the other options for his workers were subsistence farming and a grinding tax structure put in place back when firearms were a wild story from foreign traders rather than a main part of every army's arsenal.

"Ah, well, at least I'm almost home," he muttered.

"I'm looking forward to dinner!"

Masaru grinned at the boy.

"Yeah, Kaya's cooking may be simple, but it's always great. We'd better get going, though. I don't want to be too late. She gets tetchy if she has to keep it warm for too long."

"You mean, because you kept her waiting?"

Masaru shook his head.

"No, I think the real problem is because if the food sits for too long, it starts to lose that perfect flavor, and she gets upset because she can't show off her cooking at its best."

"Ohhh. Well, she's right," the boy decided with the wisdom of the young. "Food's always better when it's fresh."

"And Lord Toyama knows we'd all be eating days-old rice if we were lucky, if it wasn't for his project, so he squeezes every bit out of us that he can." He rolled his shoulders, feeling the soreness from another hard day's lifting and carrying.

"I hate to cause even more trouble for a man who's been working hard, but I was hoping that I might request a favor?"

"Eh?"

Masaru and the boy both turned to their left, where they saw a figure sitting on a stump at the edge of the tree line. Masaru hadn't noticed her until now; the shapeless white robe she wore seemed to drink in the moonlight and merge with it somehow. She pushed herself up on a knobbed stick, thought she didn't seem to need it to help her walk; her back was straight and her balance good as she approached.

"Good evening, grandmother," he greeted her politely.

"Grandmother! Am I that old now? A woman loses track of time now and again, but I didn't think I was that far gone."

She grinned broadly, making it plain that she was joking instead of offended, and showing off well-kept white teeth as she did. In the bright moonlight, Masaru estimated her age as somewhere around sixty, her skin well-kept but with the lines around the eyes and mouth of a woman who smiled a lot.

The surprise came, though, when he realized that she was a foreigner. He'd never actually seen a Western _gaijin_ before, but that had to be what she was, from the shape of her eyes, their amber color, and the rose-gold threads still scattered among the silver of her hair.

Well, a Westerner or some kind of spirit, at least. Masaru preferred the "foreigner" explanation, even if he couldn't quite picture a reason why one would be in this remote location. From what he understood, the majority of Westerners in Japan were either merchants or affiliated with the international organization, the Curia, neither group of people being one who had any business in this backwater region that he could think of.

"Don't worry, boy; I'm just teasing," she said, apparently mistaking the reason for his silence. "And in my case, it's not a bad thing if you see me as a little old and infirm. After all, I'm hoping you'll lend me that strong back of yours!"

"Oh? How so?"

"Well, it's just…I was hoping to get to the next village for the night, but that means crossing the river. I've never really been a great swimmer, so I was hoping that you could help me across."

"Ah, to carry you on my back, you mean?"

She beamed at him.

"If you'd be so kind."

"Ah! Be careful, Masaru," the boy suddenly exclaimed. "She might be a _youkai_!"

"I am _not_ a demon!" the lady yelped. She accompanied the protest with a stamp of her foot and a shake of two closed fists at chest level, making the whole thing seem like the reaction of someone forty years younger.

That didn't really help with her assertion that she _wasn't_ something other than she appeared.

"We've heard the stories," Masaru told her. "They say a demon or fiend will appear as a pretty girl, or an elderly person—someone relatively helpless, in any case—and trick a strong man into carrying them across the river. Then, once it gets them out into the water, it bites them in the back of the neck and kills them."

The old woman pulled a face.

"That's a creepy tale. Can the fiend swim?"

Sometimes they say so. Other times it's said the fiend falls into the river and the purity of the running water destroys it."

"Like the story of the scorpion and the frog!" the boy chimed in.

"I don't think I've heard that story."

Masaru wasn't all that interested in telling folk parables to an old woman, be she fiend or foreigner, but the boy jumped right in.

"There's a scorpion that comes to a river," he said, "and he wants to get across, only he doesn't know how to swim. He's about to give up and turn back when a frog comes along.

"'Mr. Frog,' he says, 'would you carry me across the river on your back? I need to get to the other side, but I can't swim.'

"'No, I won't,' says the frog, 'You are a scorpion, and if I let you on my back you will sting me and I will die.'

"'I won't sting you,' replies the scorpion. 'If I did that, then I would drown.'

"So the frog agrees, and they set out across the river. But when they're halfway across, the scorpion can't resist any longer, and he stings the frog. While they're sinking into the water, the frog asks, 'Why did you do that? Now we will both die.'

"And the scorpion says, 'I know, but that is just my nature.'"

The woman had been nodding along.

"Well, that's a bad story," she said. It was a firm declaration, a passing of judgment. "The lesson is all wrong."

"Ehhhh?" It was an open question whether Masaru or the boy was the more surprised.

"What? The point is that some people and things are what they are, and no amount of logic or kindness or anything else will change it, and that's simply not true."

Masaru glanced at the boy, who looked as dubious as he felt.

"Grandmother, we were talking about _youkai_. Demons."

The old woman nodded firmly.

"Right. Now, it's a fair point when talking about animals, and a lot of fiends, too. The less intelligence something has, the less ability it has to learn and grow and act against instinct. We all act based on what in our hearts, but the difference is"—she waggled her finger at them—"if you have a mind, you have a soul, and if you have a soul, then you can change. It's our responsibility as people."

Masaru shook his head.

"You're an odd one, grandmother."

"You've never heard of sin, then? I'm new to this country, but I can't imagine the priests in your shrines and temples don't tell you that you're responsible for choosing the right path in your life."

"No, of course they do, but—"

"No buts. That scorpion in the boy's story may have been tempted by its nature, but it didn't have to give in to that temptation. It took the wrong road." She paused, then snorted. "That's the real lesson. It gave in to the temptation to do something stupid and evil and it died for it. 'The wages of sin is death,' like they say where I come from. It's still too simple, though. Spiritual 'death' isn't the same as drowning in a river."

Masaru and the boy shared yet another glance.

"Are you trying to say that you believe that a demon, what, that they ought to learn to act like a civilized person and not attack people?"

His tone made it plain that he thought the woman was courting senility. Unless foreigners really were just that strange.

"Ah, don't take that tone with me, boy. When you've lived as long as I have, then you can start talking like you know the ways of the world."

She wagged a finger under his nose for emphasis. "Demons are just like anybody else. Some of them are perfectly nice people, and some of them are complete rotters. But I'll have none of this 'it's their nature' nonsense. If a demon is going around tricking and attacking humans, it's because they've _chosen_ to do so, and nothing else."

She swung her gaze towards the boy and pointed her stick at him.

"You might remember that the next time you start thinking about scorpions and frogs. You should always strive to be better than your desires make you. It matters, you know."

Then she meowed.

For the first couple of seconds, Masaru thought she was just talking in some weird foreign language, but then he realized that she was in fact meowing, hissing, and yowling just like a cat. He thought she'd gone crazy, until an answering set of meows from his left made Masaru question whether _he_ was the insane one. He turned to look, and saw to his shock that the boy was gone.

In his place stood a cat. It was an attractive animal, mostly black with a white blotch on its chest and white forepaws, and green eyes. And two twitching tails.

It hung its head, gave one last, apologetic meow, then turned and bounded away into the underbrush.

"He'll be okay," the old woman said. "He's just young."

" _B-bakeneko_ ," Masaru stammered.

"Is that what they call them here? A cat fiend that lives for a hundred years or so will grow a second tail and gain the power to change shape. They like to play tricks, sometimes nasty ones."

He stared at her, as flabbergasted by her nonchalance as by anything that had just happened.

"You talked to it, though. You spoke the language of fiends!"

"What? Oh, no, no. That wasn't fiend language. That was just ordinary cat. Fiend is a lot harder to learn." She looked off into space, thinking, a fingertip pressed to the corner of her mouth. "I think it's because any creature with the Blue Blood can understand any other one, so some of what they're saying is actually passed that way instead of by the actual sounds? Arnice tried to teach me a little, but I never really got the hang of it. But then, the only cats she can talk to _are_ fiends, so that makes things even," she concluded with obvious satisfaction.

This spiel did nothing to ease Masaru's confusion. If anything, it made it worse.

"What…what _are_ you?"

"Well, I used to be a priestess, but these days I'm more of a housewife with a part-time job. But right this minute, I'm an old lady with a rumbling stomach and a river between me and dinner and a bed. So are you going to give me a hand, boy, or do I need to find my own way past?"

Masaru blinked, then sighed.

"No, grandmother, I'll be happy to help. After all, a man can't go through life being afraid of scorpions."

~X X X~

 _A/N: As Arnice points out (and as is confirmed by the description of Lilysse's Ring), it's been "decades" since the events of the first game by the time the second game happens. Also noted is that Lilysse is a perfectly normal human (the lifespan issue being something that Aluche also grapples with in-game)._

 _All of which means that it's even more impressive to me that she managed to escape—apparently on her own, without help—from Malvasia!_

 _And hey, all that's said is that she headed east; nothing ever mentioned how far…_


End file.
